The New Big Lie

For years, the Big Lie around New York City baseball was that the Mets could not compete because that rotten Bernie Madoff had robbed them blind.

Come spring training, the writers would cluster around Wilpon Senior and ask him if his team had any big moves planned, and ol' Fred would just look shamefaced and scratch at the ground with his shoe, and bravely mumble something about, "Well, of course I can't talk about the ongoing investigation..."

And everybody would nod in sympathy, and go off and write something along the lines of, "Eli Wiesel AND the Mets?  That Madoff!  Arrrrgh!"

Somehow, none of the Knights of the Press Box ever got around to ask how it was, if Wilpon had been such a big victim, that the federal investigators were trying to claw back money from the Mets owner.

In other words, the Wilpons weren't victims of the Madoff scam at all but beneficiaries, and—wittingly or unwittingly—accomplices, their big name helping to pull in more of the rubes.

"The loss" Fred was referring to was that he would no longer have the guaranteed, every-quarter-like-clockwork, 18 percent payoff on his investment that Madoff delivered to his clients, all of whom should of course have realized that this was simply the latest twist on Mr. Ponzi's marvelous invention.

The Wilpons, in reality, were always an undercapitalized family for major-league ownership in the first place, and more interested in running real estate rackets than anything to do on a baseball field.

Now, though, they are about to be put in the shade by the latest Big Lie:  Hal's Crushing Debt Service.

Haven't you heard?  Poor Hal and his billionaire family have to shell out $90 million clams a year—count 'em, 90,000,000!—just to service the sparkling new ballpark they have bestowed on us, so lovingly plopped right in the middle of what was once a beloved neighborhood park.

We can go into just how awful that park—the first major-league stadium ever NOT to have full views of the field for its bleacher denizens—really is.

But before the consumers of Hal's best scotch and steak get started on just how onerous this debt is upon the Bronx's very own Jean Valjean, let's get the facts down:

—As previously noted, the Yankees received $1.2 billion in tax breaks and direct subsidies for the new House that Hal Built:

http://www.fieldofschemes.com/documents/Yanks-Mets-costs.pdf

1.2 billion—that's over 13 times that $90 million a year payout.

—As reported here and elsewhere, Forbes claims that the Yankees spend the smallest percentage of their revenue on payroll, just 29.7 percent.  In dollar terms, that means of the $650 million in revenue the team reported for 2018, it spent just $193 million on payroll.

That's a gap of $457 million—or over five times the annual, backbreaking payment of $90 mill in debt service.

https://www.pinstripealley.com/2018/12/26/18155959/yankees-spending-budget-payroll-percentage-revenue-player-salaries-free-agents-steinbrenner-cashman

—Of course, determining actual team revenue is about as easy as getting meaningful Russian GDP stats out of Vladdy Putin, as Ma Boone calls him.  It's not clear at all that that figure includes what the team hauls down from YES, the network it is planning to buy back.

And I don't know just what YES under its current ownership pays the Yankees.  But I do know that, according to Forbes, the team got $3.04 billion—that's BILLION—for selling 80 percent of YES to Murdoch back in 2012-2014.

Take away what little in taxes the Steinbrenner's pay and maybe any remaining, minor partners, and they probably cleared, what?  At least $2.5 billion?

Or in other words, close to 30 times that annual debt service.  And we're not even talking about the Yankees' money for radio, foreign-language broadcasts, social media rights, or their share of the national networks' payout of $800 million a year—which comes to about $26.7 million a team.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/barrymbloom/2018/08/28/yankees-intend-to-buy-back-yes-network-after-fox-sale-to-disney/#7c276838161d

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_League_Baseball_on_television

—Also, let's break down those ticket costs.  The Yankees last year had the highest attendance in baseball, at 3,482,855.

Now, with dynamic pricing, getting any figures on average ticket prices is difficult.  But here's CNBC with a 2015 claim that an average Yankees ticket then was $101.43.

Figuring just a moderate inflation in that cost—say, to $110—were talking $383,114,050 in seat prices alone...or four times that notorious $90 million.

https://www.cnbc.com/2015/04/08/the-most-expensive-regular-season-mlb-game-tickets.html

—Of course, one of the rottenest things the Yankees did in building their rotten new stadium, was to  eliminate over 9,000 seats from Yankee Stadium II, in order to almost triple the number of luxury suites, from 19 to 56 (and to lower capacity by about 27,000 from the 74,200 the Yanks first shoved in there on Opening Day, 1923).

Again, it's hard to calculate just how much more money than means, with "dynamic pricing"—i.e., "turning a vendor into a sort of gigantic, institutionalized scalper."

But since the suites currently go for $8,500-$15,000 a game—and can go for up to $20,000 for "premuium" games, I'm figuring they increased revenues on that alone by about $30-$40 million a year.

https://www.suiteexperiencegroup.com/all-suites/mlb/new-york-yankees/

All right, I won't even go into how much the Yanks probably make in profit on their outrageous parking fees, or their merchandise, or their concessions.  (Hey, rat dropping don't grow on trees, you know!).  Or how much they're planning to realize on MLB's brave new push into gambling.

I'll leave it to the good folks at Forbes to estimate how it was—even back in 2015—the Yankees were the wealthiest franchise in the game, with a valuation of $3.4 billion, or nearly 40 times the white-man-from-Cleveland's annual burden.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/nickdesantis/2016/04/08/how-the-10-most-valuable-major-league-baseball-teams-make-their-money-visualized/#40c845c6b5a1

Finally, there's this:  taking into account that the Yanks can deduct that $90 million from their expected luxury tax and revenue-sharing bites—and taking into account that wonderful accounting trick known as "depreciation"—does anyone at all think Hal is REALLY paying out $90 million a year to start with?

Just wanted to ask, before the Next Big Lie gets its boots on.